Orson Welles: Trending quotes

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Orson Welles: 106 quotes47 likes

“Don't let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons”

Near death request to filmmaker Henry Jaglom
[Lebo, Harlan, Citizen Kane:the fiftieth-anniversary album, Doubleday, 1990, 194, 978-0-385-41473-9, 2009-12-27]

“Just breathe at the end of the line or on the punctuation. If you lose that, and lose the iambic pentameter, you'll lose all the sense of what you're saying. And if you do breathe, you'll find that Shakespeare's verse is like a surfboard.”

Orson Welles

Keith Baxter interviewed by Geoff Andrew for the British Film Institute (on the only piece of direction Welles ever gave him) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qON_f32HQDk

“He [Welles] was an onlooker at the clumsy, poignant suicide of "The Man on the Ledge," which took place in New York in 1938, when a boy perched for fourteen hours on a window-sill of the Gotham Hotel before plunging into the street. "I stood in the crowd outside for a long time," Welles says pensively, "and wanted to make a film of it all. But they tell me that in the Hollywood version of the film they gave the boy a reason for what he did. That's crazy. It's the crowd that needs explaining."”

Orson Welles

Kenneth Tynan, "Orson Welles," from Persona Grata (1953); later printed in Profiles (1990) [ISBN 0-06-096557-6], page 66.

“You don't know what I'm up against. Because it's full of, of, of things that are only correct because they're grammatical, but they're tough on the ear, you see. This is a very wearying one. It's unpleasant to read. Unrewarding. "Because Findus freeze the cod at sea, and then add a crumb-crisp" Ooh, "crumb-crisp coating." Ahh, that's tough, "crumb-crisp coating." I think, no, because of the way it's written, you need to break it up, because it's not, it's not as conversationally written.”

Orson Welles

The Findus Foods "Frozen Peas" Session Out-Takes

“As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect.”

Orson Welles

Mitry, Jean; King, Christopher. The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (1999). Indiana University Press. [ISBN 0-253-21377-0], p. 176.

“Take myself as a good-will ambassador. I'm great — I'm taking myself as a character — for the intellectuals and the man on the street. I'm great where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. leaves off. I'm not so good with high society, in either North or South America, because I'm highly unconventional. Perhaps I bewilder people by being at once the esthete, the intellectual and the vulgarian.”

Orson Welles

Quoted by Chan Norris, "Orson Welles on Latin America". PM, September 13, 1942, page 17.

“This theatre is your theatre. You are responsible for its creation and its progress.”

Orson Welles

the bottom of an original program for the 1936 WPA presentation of Voodoo MacBeth http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fedtp/ftsmth00.html|at.

“The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.”

Orson Welles

Quoted in an interview from Hollywood Voices, ed. Andrew Sarris (1971).

“One should make movies innocently — the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden…Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D. W. Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody.”

Orson Welles

Quoted in The Orson Welles Story.

“A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens.”

Orson Welles

Quoted by Peter Bogdanovich, from the DVD audio commentary on The Lady from Shanghai (1947).

“I have only one real enemy in my life that I know about, and that is John Houseman. Everything begins and ends with that hostility behind the mandarin benevolence.”

Orson Welles

Quoted by Richard Meryman in Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz. New York: Morrow, 1978, page 255.

“I spend… twenty times more for you people than any other commercial I've ever made. You are such pests! Now what is it you want? In your… depths of your ignorance, what is it you want? Whatever it is you want, I can't deliver, 'cause I just don't see it.”

Orson Welles

The Findus Foods "Frozen Peas" Session Out-Takes

“We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes…”

Orson Welles

<I>(pauses, and continues with a note of disgust in his voice)</I> This is a lot of <I>shit</I>, you know that! You want one more? One more on the beef?
The Findus Foods "Frozen Peas" Session Out-Takes